Fancy Sun, the faded caption reads. That’s all I know about her. I don’t know who her people are, but from the costume she wears, I believe she is Plains Indian. For more than fifteen years her picture intrigued me. Her photograph was one of twelve that were part of a calendar I purchased to use as part of a thematic unit on American Indians. Time and sunlight has erased the photographer’s first name. The last name – Hensen – is all that is legible now, and that barely so. To the photographer, thank you for the wonderful picture that inspired me to write SHADOW HUNTER.
Elementary school teachers are notorious packrats. Being a teacher myself, I know this to be true. Everything is a treasure, everything a “must keep.” But I don’t like clutter. At the end of each school year, I’d go through accumulated material, happily tossing out that which I did not deem a “must keep.” But six of Hensen’s photographs were different. Their hold on me was rather supernatural. They captivated me. Time and time again, as I went through the yearly cleaning process, I’d hold the six pictures in my hands, mulling them over, not understanding why I continued to keep them when similar pictures sailed into the trash can. The picture of the little Plains girl dressed in cultural clothes captured me the most, as did another picture of a teenage girl, dressed in soft deerskin, sitting on horseback. It was probably two years before I left teaching that Fancy Sun spoke to me. Not literally, of course, and months before I put fingers to the keyboard to begin her story. I suddenly saw her as Ryder Jae Lee, the little girl who grew up to be the teenager on horseback, the Native American girl predestined to travel the roads in a black Ford pickup truck with a ghost dog, tracking a vampire that had killed her sister, and destroying entities that sustained themselves on humans.
The mystical Korean warrior came to me in a dream, which I’m pretty sure sprung my fascination with Asian foreign films, especially action-packed films involving martial arts. From that dream came the idea of a vision sent by Jae’s people calling the warrior to America to take charge of the predestined child, to train her in the ways of Shadow Hunters. From the warrior came the son who would take over the raising and training of the child after the assassination of his father, and with the son came the retired Army Rangers who became Jae’s guardians and her support team.
From a yellowing photograph taken from a calendar and a dream came a story which seemed to evolve on its own. It did not take me long to write Shadow Hunter. The story flowed, as if little Fancy Sun was sitting right beside me, whsipering into my ear.
Perhaps you have an old yellowing photograph that speaks to you. Maybe you hear the whispering of a story. Why not tell it?
